Cuil Blog

Every few seconds, Cuil analyzes the top microblogging and social websites to extract the newest relevant Web pages — meaning as soon as someone tweets or diggs a page, we crawl, index and stream the page to users (if we think the page is relevant and not too spammy). We show these pages as soon as 5 seconds after they’ve been discussed.

If you keep the search results page open, Cuil will keep refreshing these results.

If you’d like to continue to follow new pages about a topic over time, you can click the expand icon to launch Cuil’s Streaming Widget. This will float independently from the search page. You can have more than one widget open to follow your favorites.

You’ll also see a list of other currently hot topics that are related to your search. These change over time. Click on them to see more.

Drag the timescale slider to filter results by time (ranging from one hour to one day). This will show the best results for the given time period. By default the newest relevant results are shown as Cuil discovers them (streaming).

Here are a few queries that show streaming results right now:

• Obama
• iPhone
• Iran
• H1N1

Give it a try and let us know what you think.

What a day to make a person feel alive! We woke up to the insistent alerts that the power was down in a datacenter. What an adrenaline rush… quickly followed by a rush to said datacenter.

It is always the seatbelt that strangles you. In this case, it was the backup power generator that caused a cascading GFI incident all the way back to Silicon Valley Power.

Today we learned why our Ops team gave us all keychain flashlights—during a power outage, it’s dark in the dungeons (except for the sparks from the parts that are causing the darkness).

To our relief, when the power was back, only our raid storage backups had been corrupted. The only stuff we lost was the stuff we had backed up. As for our crawlfiles—where the Web is our backup—we didn’t lose any of that.

The theory for the datacenter outage is pasted below in its entirety…

The currently postulated scenario for what happened: a surge from SVP caused a surge arrestor to do its job and absorb the energy surge. However in the process of doing so it ruptured and spewed a cloud of thick black smoke onto a high voltage power bus. The smoke and debris was enough to allow the high voltage power to form an arc to a grounded metal cabinet, which would have been spectacular to see if anyone had been watching. The large current flowing into the ground circuit caused numerous safety cutoffs to trip, much like when you press the legendary Big Red Button (emergency power off), because abnormal ground current is ordinarily a potentially lethal situation. The equipment decides under the circumstances that it’s safer to kill power than operators. —Eric

Never a dull day!

Cuil continually strives to bring the information you are looking for from the depths of the Internet to the first search results page. One of our goals is to extract structure from the unstructured web and present it to you in an informative, visually appealing and accessible way. Today, we announce the launch of our newest feature in this direction — Maplines.

You might be thinking, “What in the world is a Mapline?” Just as our Timelines show a concept across time, our Maplines show a concept across a map.

A search for bird watching results in a map with points across the world which relate to bird watching. Let’s look at some of them:

• Krabi Province, Thailand: There are many hard-to-find birds such as: Gurneys, Finfoots, Bigwinged Brown Kingfishers, Egrets, Bitterns and Herons etc.
• Yell, Shetland, Scotland: Bobby Tulloch, perhaps the best known resident of Yell and noted Shetland ornithologist, who rocked the bird watching establishment, by discovering a pair of breeding Snowy Owls on neighbouring Fetlar when working as a tourist guide.

We make it easy to explore the concept you searched for and how it relates to a particular location on the map—hovering your mouse over a pin will result in a pop-up with a longer description and a link to search for related pages.

Here are some queries that result in Maplines:

• John Legend
• Byzantine Empire
• London Bridge
• George Orwell
• Los Angeles Lakers

We hope our data mining experiments and features are helping you find the information you are looking for and explore areas of interest in a more visual way. As always, we’d love to hear from you.

Although we’re based in the US, Cuil has a relatively large following of users from other parts of the world. Some of these countries don’t have the luxury of high-speed broadband internet connections, and to to help them get easier access to information, we’ve launched a new preference to put the site into Low Bandwidth mode. Of course, people with less-speedy connections in the US are more than welcome to use it as well!

When in Low Bandwidth mode, the Cuil search results page loses some of its interesting sidebar information for the sake of speed. The images associated with results are removed, and results are reformatted into a single column. While this means a far less interactive experience, page loads become tiny and fast for slow connections. To turn on Low Bandwidth mode, just toggle the option from the Preferences page (which is also now conveniently linked to from the Cuil homepage).

As a reminder, we also have a version of Cuil optimized for mobile devices. You can access the mobile version by simply going to http://www.cuil.com on your Apple iPhone, Palm Pre, or any Android device like the T-Mobile G1.

A lot of users have written to us asking how to make Cuil the default search engine in Safari. Our response up to now has been that it simply isn’t possible. Apple restricts Safari’s search to Google only, and there is no way to change this in Safari’s preferences. However, there is another method out there that works quite well, but it involves installing a Safari plugin. In the past, we have shied away from recommending this due to the involved installation process.

Our users have spoken loudly though, and there are now better plugins available than when we first surveyed the issue. In this post I will guide you through the task of installing Glims, a great Safari plugin, and configuring it to search Cuil. It’s not that painful. I promise!

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